Part 6

It is safe to compliment Mr Arthur Machen upon having produced a book that stands, and will perhaps continue to stand, quite alone in English fiction. Fellows might be found for it in the modern letters of Germany and France, but not even the most determined of our own symbolists has produced such an elaborate account of the adventures of an exclusively æsthetic nature in the rough world. But apart from such praise as that acknowledgment confers, it is not at all easy to put a value on Mr Machen’s “Hill of Dreams.” It is written in a simple yet studied English that conveys in the deeper passages of the book as much of magic as words can impart; yet the whole work is so unreal and so charged with spiritual disease that there is scarcely a place for it in the widest utilitarian view. Beyond an impression of intense agony of the soul, it leaves little behind it, and there is nothing to the purpose that a critic can say except that the book evidently answered to something in the writer, and may answer to something in others. The growth of Lucian Taylor’s fervently mystic and quite inhuman nature, perfectly pure, perfectly egoistic, is traced with power. Most of his outward tragedy is that of the artist’s struggle with the world, and of his association with gross and ordinary British barbarians, whose manners are described with a cleverness and a rancour in which we can find nothing but weakness; the inward story—if such a web of shadows can be called a story—is one of some strange insight into the obscurity of an essential evil in nature, of a strange development of the passion of love in the soul of the ascetic of art, of his sufferings, his dreams, and of his final destruction by the shadowy power of ill that laid its hands upon him as a child, on the hill where once the Romans camped. An undefined horror penetrates all the story, like an invisible vapour. It is an extraordinary performance and a work of art; but art fallen, we think, on unclean and fatal days.

[Sidenote: _Birmingham Gazette and Express_]

... There is much fine writing, but probably few other than literary craftsmen will follow with patience the detailed story of his striving after perfection in the use of language. The most pleasing part of the book is that which treats of his love for and idealisation of the simple, womanly country girl, Annie Morgan. It is scarcely a “healthy” book, but it is evidently the work of a man who has thought deeply and suffered much.

[Sidenote: _Manchester Courier_]

It would be hard to classify “The Hill of Dreams,” by Arthur Machen, for it is both unprecedented and unusual. Moreover, it is unpleasing and unconvincing, though its writer possesses a wealth of imagery and a power not often met with. The little story there is concerns the life of Lucian Taylor, but the plot of the book is but a peg on which the author hangs a detailed study of temperament. Lucian is a “dreamer,” with literary aspirations. His early life is devoid of all humanising influences, and his character is only explicable, and then not very satisfactorily so, when this is remembered. Despite education and cultivation, Lucian never possesses any feelings which a barbarian might not be expected to have. He never imposes the least restraint on his natural susceptibility, and both as a boy and a man is a sensualist. After living a life of failure, in which, apart from his vivid dreams, a passion for a country girl is the only important event, he commits suicide. The reader is left in doubt whether Lucian was a genius neglected by an unappreciative world or a fool totally incapable of understanding the beauty of the world. The writing of the book is astonishingly versatile. At times there is the gruesomeness of Poe, at others the charm of Hawthorne. The descriptions of country scenery show a love of the picturesque, and the chapters on London life a knowledge of the seamy side of nature. Though there is splendid capability shown in the book, it will not make a wide appeal because of its want of humanity.

[Sidenote: _Birmingham Post_]

Mr Arthur Machen’s is hardly the sort of story that is likely to win admiration from the average reader of current fiction. Perhaps it is as well, for “The Hill of Dreams” is not a healthy book, and the power of fascination that it exercises is tempered with a certain instinctive feeling of repugnance. Let it be said at once that it does fascinate. It is filled with passages of rare beauty. Mr Machen understands the magic of words; his sentences are as silk shot with rich, variegated, and harmonious colour; they have a fine rhythmic flow also; and page after page is filled with “a procession of images” (we quote the author’s own words), “now of rapture and ecstasy and now of terror and shame, floating in a light that is altogether phantasmal and unreal.” So far as charm of language and beauty of imagery go—and they go far—the season is hardly likely to see the rival of Mr Machen’s novel. The weakness is that all this accumulated beauty is something fantastic, exotic, and bizarre. Mr Machen leads us through a forest of flowers; but they are _fleurs de mal_, in Baudelaire’s phrase, sprung from miasmatic ground, and spreading a perfume by which the atmosphere is vitiated. Through his power of conjuring up visions of the world of long ago and living in a dreamland of his own Lucian Taylor claims some kinship with Du Maurier’s “Peter Ibbetson.” By the circumstances of his death he stands related to the English opium-eater. But Mr Machen has neither Du Maurier’s light touch and sense of humour nor De Quincey’s stern insistence on the penalties of such visionary delights. His attitude is too accurately that which another exquisite artist, Ernest Dowson, assumed in the sonnet, now fairly well known, “To One in Bedlam”:—

Oh, lamentable brother! if these pity thee, Am I not fain of all thy lone eyes promise me— Half a fool’s kingdom, far from men who sow and reap All their days vanity.

So Dowson sang; and in the same mood Mr Machen seems inclined, throughout the greater part of his book at any rate, to hold up his invertebrate hero—or victim—as a subject for sympathy and admiration. “Invertebrate” is too weak a word. Most of Lucian’s peculiarities are definable in the terminology of specialists in mental alienation. He is a sufferer from what an expert witness in the American “cause célèbre” of the day called lately “exaggerated ego.” Echolalia (in his attempts at authorship), melancholia, visual and auditory hallucinations—all these familiar phenomena of an unbalanced mind does he exhibit; and doubtless the specialist in such diseases might trace more. It is because his attitude towards this “lamentable brother” is too nearly that of Ernest Dowson and too far from that of (say) De Quincey that Mr Machen has failed to produce a piece of great literature which is above all things sane and level-headed. On the other side of the scales must be put a fertile imagination, a great deal of acute psychological analysis, and an extraordinary sensitiveness to impressions of natural beauty. These are sufficiently enviable endowments, which one hopes to see Mr Machen exercising in the future on some more happily treated subject.

[Sidenote: _Newcastle Chronicle_]

Mr Machen’s story is all about a young man who adds to a temperament naturally neurotic a passion for examining the inner workings of his own mind, and a dislike for nourishing food. This combination of qualities reduces him to a skeleton, and enables him to see visions and dream dreams of the most fantastic variety. Those who are familiar with Mr Machen’s work will recognise in such a subject one particularly suited to his _métier_. Step by step he traces, with fine imagination, the workings of the disordered brain until the inevitable end of complete madness and death is reached. Only Mr Machen, perhaps, would not have us believe that his hero is mad; preferring if anything to think that he is of a sanity and clear-sightedness altogether denied to the devotees of plain living and plain thinking.

[Sidenote: _Morning Post_]

Mr Machen has chosen for his book one of those subjects that depend entirely on their treatment for their success or failure. “The Hill of Dreams” provides an analysis of the character of an imaginative young man consumed with literary aspirations. Unfortunately, the treatment of this theme is marred by the two faults of exaggeration and monotonous insistence on the psychological note of alternate despair and exultation. The delineation of moods must be made variable if it is to be palatable to the reader; otherwise weariness of the mind ensues as a necessary consequence. Lucian Taylor’s continuous habit of selfish introspection ultimately leads him to madness and “death by misadventure,” but these misfortunes do not induce sympathy in the reader when he has become satiated with the morbidity which itself brought them about. At the same time, the book has style and is full of so many well-written descriptions of scenery that one is inclined to forget about the dreamer and only to dwell in fancy on the beautiful “Hill of Dreams” which prompted his visions.

[Sidenote: _P.T.O._]

Mr Arthur Machen’s first long novel, “The Hill of Dreams,” fails in humanity. The hero’s literary struggles are desperate; the hero himself is an abstraction. The author labours too much over his work for it to be wholly satisfactory; we are obliged to him for the pains he takes in these days of careless writing, but could wish the effort less apparent. In his pictures of Welsh scenery he is at his best; in suburbia he lays it on with a trowel, and makes himself more unhappy than ever he will make the worthy folk he dislikes should they chance upon his book. In a word, Mr Machen has yet to find a story, yet to create real living people.

[Sidenote: _The Scotsman_]

Mr Machen’s novel displays a singular ability in giving a sustained and varied interest to a theme of which the material is to the last degree simple and monotonous. He has no more story to tell than how a young man, a country clergyman’s son, feeling that he had a gift for literature, went up to London, and kept writing and writing and writing while he lived in a world of dreams, quite misunderstood and untouched by the outer world of everyday circumstance, until at last he came to kill himself, having accomplished nothing. Such is the subject, and it seems, thus stated, to afford little matter enough for a full-length story. But the work goes with such a skilful psychology into the workings of the unhappy young man’s mind, and shows such fine imaginative artistry in varying the light and shade of his emotions and contrasting his outward with his inward life, that it proves interesting from first to last without even for a moment disturbing its air of soft tranquillity. It is a story that will readily impress a reader of quiet tastes who can reach to the more subtle refinements of fiction.

[Sidenote: _The Athenæum_]

... In the emotional adventures of the hapless youth who is a victim of a species of nympholepsy and intellectual loneliness combined, we cannot, after the first hundred pages, feel any adequate interest. His agonies while engaged in the long-drawn-out struggle with his stubborn literary gifts are too protracted, too remote from any human sentiment, to hold the interest of the reader. Their recital is almost as monotonous as, and far more fatiguing than, the artistic _débâcle_ of the painter in Zola’s “L’Œuvre,” which had at least some elements of humanity. But the spirit of place which informs the book, whether it is the forlorn, illimitable dreariness of suburbia that the author chooses to show us, or the mysterious and melancholy beauty of that wild Wales he knows so well, could only have found expression at the hand of an adept. It is perhaps a pity that so clever a writer as Mr Machen should bestow such infinite pains on astonishing the bourgeois, who in all likelihood will never have the privilege of reading his books; it is an obsession that brings to mind the unprofitableness of flogging dead horses. But, after all, the main matter for regret is the utter formlessness and the arid inhumanity of his work. His Muse is a kind of Lilith—not a drop of her blood is human—and thus, except from the decorative point of view, he leaves us cold....

[Sidenote: _The Daily Graphic_]

A curious and fanciful book, which shows much misdirected ability. It is the study of the temperament of a young man, who devotes himself to literature, but his imagination is abnormal, and his mental condition diseased. The book is not of much practical interest, as one feels that his death, with which the story ends, is the best possible solution of his difficulties.

[Sidenote: _The Daily Chronicle_]

Mr Arthur Machen has written “The Hill of Dreams,” we take it, not with a view to saying anything in particular, but rather with a view to saying something in a particular—almost a precious—way. We fancy that he would not greatly object to identify himself with his hero, of whom he says:—

Language, he understood, was chiefly important for the beauty of its sounds, by its possession of words resonant, glorious to the ear, by its capacity, when exquisitely arranged, of suggesting wonderful and indefinable impressions, perhaps more ravishing and farther removed from the domain of strict thought than the impressions excited by music itself. Here lay hidden the sensuous art of literature, it was the secret of suggestion, the art of causing delicious sensation by the use of words. In a way, therefore, literature was independent of thought; the mere English listener, if he had an ear attuned, could recognise the beauty of a splendid Latin phrase.

One would like to have Mr Machen’s criticism of that majestic line of R. L. Stevenson’s:—

Opulent orotundo strike the sky!

“The Hill of Dreams” is a long, and in many respects, a clever psychological analysis and demonstration of the mind of a young degenerate. It is a deliberate and careful study of morbidity. It is well written, but written not quite well enough. The good writing is just a thought too obvious; one cannot help noticing it. It has what Mr Machen calls “the secret of suggestion,” but it suggests some things which we would much rather had not been suggested. It is a thoughtful piece of work though, and it is often lighted up by swift and penetrating flashes of satire. We wish the word “sonorous” did not occur quite so often in it. “Sonorous” is a very good and effective word in its way, but, like “sinister,” “sombre,” and one or two others, it should be used sparingly. It does not do to make a pet of it.

[Sidenote: _The Manchester Guardian_]

Without a refined susceptibility to sensuous impressions there can be no high art. But there is always a danger that the artist who recognises this theoretically may give rein to susceptibility and sensitiveness as such and be drawn headlong along the road to mere sensationalism. For in art, as in everything else, the ultimate value of a sensation lies always in its content. The fact that your sensations seem to you “exquisite” or “delicious” no more gives them artistic than it would give them moral import; in the one case as in the other, there is the further question to be asked, the question what kind of person you are who feel them so. Which question leads in its turn to other questions, all pointing unmistakably one way. Sensation, you find, gives you no principle either in art or in anything else. It can open no locked doors. Take it for your guide and there can be no doubt but you will be landed, sooner or later, in the ditch. Mr Arthur Machen in his new story “The Hill of Dreams” drives perilously near this dangerous territory. He recounts the life of a hypersensitive youth of whom the world is not worthy, upon whose delicate nature the violence of healthy humanity rasps and jars, who therefore, shut up within himself, runs riot in a fantastic maze of morbid mystic fancies, constructs an impossible romance out of a chance meeting with a farmer’s daughter in the dark (for whose sake he afterwards inflicts upon himself nightly penance with a gorse bough), and finally drifts up to London and laudanum and an untimely end. This kind of story could only fail to be suffocating in its effect upon the reader if the oxygen absent in the hero were supplied by some sort of exhilaration derivable from the background against which he moves. But he moves, alas! in an atmosphere as exquisite and as exhausted as he is. “He knew that he himself had solved the riddle, that he held in his hand the powder of projection, the philosopher’s stone transmuting all it touched to fine gold, the gold of exquisite impressions.” It is of these impressions, this “powder of projection,” that the bulk of the narrative is composed. If your air is full of dust, it is no matter what kind of particles the dust is made of; let it be powdered gold, the effect is just as choking. Many objections might be advanced against a story like “The Hill of Dreams” on the score of its subject matter: the artist would be ready to dismiss these as ethical and irrelevant. But the unrelieved preciosity of the style is equally open to criticism, and this is the rock upon which the book finally founders. “Only in the Court of Avallaunius is the true science of the exquisite to be found.” It would be wise to leave it unmolested there; here in these lower courts, this “land of sin and woe,” there is nothing that more quickly tends to tedium.—B. S.

[Sidenote: Louis Weitzenkorn in _The New York World_]

Arthur Machen’s “The Hill of Dreams,” according to the introduction included in a new American edition, was written in 1897. It was published first in 1907. Mr Knopf would have been much fairer to Mr Machen had he left this book to perish in the dust of things forgotten. It has a great beauty of writing. The Machen style is clearly a deliberate and successful attempt to get melody into prose. But it strikes us that music is not the first element of a prose style; in fact it is one part that, under compulsion, might be omitted without injury. After all, the poets are entitled to something.

Our first demand from a prose work styled a novel is living characters. Except in the last three paragraphs, not one breath of life shows up in “The Hill of Dreams.” Mr Machen confesses his plan to have been the writing of a “Robinson Crusoe” of the mind. As to that there is a touch of similarity here to “Peter Ibbetson,” and more to Jack London’s “Star Rover.” Naturally enough, Machen didn’t see this latter work of fiction before he began his. But it is to the analogy of “Robinson Crusoe” that we mainly object. After all, that cast-off sailor had a man Friday who was every inch alive. Good, deadly arrows fly through Defoe’s book. Ships and savages and hot sunlight beat down.

Whatever there is of Lucian Taylor beyond the author’s frail beating against life, is something of a masculine and British Carol Kennicott. That’s crowding a reputation, even a fictional one, pretty badly, but the futile protest and final escape of Lucian Taylor through suicide doesn’t follow as four does two plus two and as true tragedy must. Not once does the book move us to feel for this hero, who lives like an essay in the _Atlantic Monthly_. He and the British countryside aristocracy—the British Main Streeters—are so many children’s toys. They are dolls that get from one end of the room to the other only when lifted up and moved.

Machen has written this book as if he had been young and angry. He seems to have wanted to nail his old neighbours to some sort of cross. He forgets that the Babbitts are the very ones who read “Babbitt” and make the author rich.

The book will not enhance Machen’s rather high reputation here. His incident of the hanging of a dog by a set of children, not one of whom protests, will never be swallowed, at least by American readers. The rest of the book is just as impossible. We are willing still to take our knowledge of Main Street Britons from Mr Bennett’s “Five Towns.”

THE SECRET GLORY

[Sidenote: _Manchester Guardian_]

It is a little difficult to know what kind of readers “The Secret Glory” is intended to please, and there is a temptation to believe that its author wrote it simply and solely for his own amusement. The greatest works of art are no doubt those in which an artist insists on satisfying his own standard of taste, but Mr Machen’s game on this occasion seems to have been rather that of “letting himself go.” He begins with a vivid indictment of the English public school, but does not produce either an original or a convincing picture of its faults and failings; and he then proceeds to cut the painter and to launch forth into a juvenile description of a juvenile escapade in London which his schoolboy hero, half mystic, half Bohemian, is supposed to share with a young lady of his choice, though not of his class—the whole embroidered with wonderful pæans to punch and poetry, surrounded with a sort of religious halo, and penetrated with a peculiar flavour of what one might call inebriate innocence. There are perhaps deep lessons to be drawn from the perusal of these singular heroics, but we have not succeeded in discovering or profiting by them. The narrative itself is allusive and obscure. Huge jokes are supposed to be concealed on one side, and on the other the profound, impenetrable import of things. But, judging by what is actually communicated to us, we remain in doubt whether what is withheld was either very funny or very significant.—B. S.

[Sidenote: _Punch_]